After speaking with them in their practice space in July, we waved the flag on San Francisco’s own Weekend as a band to seriously keep your eyes on. There’s a lot of shoe-gaze making the rounds these days, but Weekend brings some of most charged elements of punk and post-rock to keep it pressing and renewed. When you’re touring with A Place to Bury Strangers, you’re going to need some ear-bursting, bleeding-red energy. And with their first full-length, Sports, Weekend provides just that. Having served us with two fantastic singles ahead of the album this year (“End Times,” a track taken from their split with the Young Prisms, is one of our favorites from earlier this year), Sports was shaping to be quite a ride, most likely a fast, hazy and spirited one. So let’s get these windows down! Wait wait wait… can you unlock my window?
Sports rockets into play on “Coma Summer,” with hot pace and a youthful attitude. The bass and drums give the music a distinctly punk base layer, while the often blistering, at times droning, and at others clanging guitar work of Kevin Johnson grab you by the neck and throw you through alleys of rupturing texture. In the spirit of Kevin Shields and Ira Kaplan, Johnson throws a diverse set of distorted tantrums through his pickups. Overlaid all of this chaos are the vocals of Shaun Durkan, which serve more as an instrumental compliment to Kevin’s fretwork than as the vehicle of a story teller. They’re predominantly indistinguishable, at times sounding almost inhuman amongst the storm clouds of fuzzed-out distortion. Yet, on tracks like “Coma Summer” Durkan leans heavily on captivating melodies, getting downright anthemic.
Though the more immediately memorable tracks come rather fueled, there’s a lot of diversity to the pace and vibe of the record. It’s noisy, that’s for damn sure. And was probably loud as hell to record (and meant to be played that way). But there’s a lot of trade off between how that noise is shaped. For instance, “Monday Morning” exchanges offense for slow, swelling waves of distortion and drifty vocals, while the cruising bass line keeps complete eruption imminent (which eventually comes at the beginning of “Monongah, WV.”) It’s rarely busy; Sports is mostly minimalistic, as the cover art my suggest. And while the tour-mates might suggest a bleaker feel, Sports lends itself to plenty of triumph.
In every sense, this is city music. It’s disorienting, aggressive, and overwhelming, with moments of unity, release and a damn good fight in it. Kids in Manchester are going piss themselves over it. And for good reason; it challenges where its influences like Joy Division left off with a modern attack and renewed vigor. It’s a hell of a record and well worth the ear damage.
- matthew hunt
